Throughout my life I have been surrounded by friends and family members that have struggled with mental health, growing up, my aunt who suffers from schizophrenia lived with us for 2 years, and as a kid I was confused by her condition, and my parents and other family members felt powerless and uncapable of helping her. Throughout high-school I had many close friends come to me and trust me with their struggles, many of them struggled with suicidal thoughts, due to depression, anxiety or personal circumstances. While in a volunteer experience far from home, I received a call from my brother telling me that he wanted to commit suicide and was hoping that I would be able to help him understand and feel that his life was worth living, and to this day I am grateful that he chose to live. These experiences although they were harder for those that were suffering, made me feel the need to educate myself and continue to help as much as I can to those that struggle mentally and emotionally. I grew up in Argentina, and just like many other cultures, mental illnesses were defined as weaknesses, or wanting attention, and other common stigmas around mental illnesses. Since that is how I grew up, I believed that, but after going through a good amount of experiences that exposed me to the reality of mental disorders, I understood that the level of awareness of oneself is very different across different individuals, the way they perceive their environment, their thoughts, emotions, etc. can change drastically from one individual to another which can negatively impact and overshadow the enormous potential residing in each individual . This helped me realize that even though a complete understanding of others' overall conscious experience is almost impossible, it is important that everyone can count with a support system that it is tailored to their needs, based on an educated notion of how others can be of help to those suffering from mental illnesses, specially family, friends, and educational institutions. I believe that these 3 institutions that are present in almost everyone's life, whether all together or separately, have a great influence in an individual's mental health, and from the foundation of their support system, which often times fails them because of a lack of education and sometimes willingness to learn. My main focus in order to make an impact in an individual's life, is to first, make the best out of my academic experience, in order to become a competent professional that can expand on the methods used to help those who suffer from mental disorders but also to help educate those that can support those in need of help. And as a long time goal, I look forward to work on stablishing an organization that can provide accessible resources to help individuals and communities understand and apply principles that can expand their knowledge of the biological, psychological and sociological factors related to mental disorders that can be used to help mainly victims of mental illnesses and people around them and also people in general, since there is a lot these principles that one can learn and use in their life even if they don not experience any type of mental disorder. All of this with the end goal of increasing the mental health standard in our society by increasing general knowledge regarding mental health.